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Some new IPv6 tools to explore

2026-05-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

My company (https://hexabuild.io) has been investing in building out IPv6 tool and I wanted to take a moment and cover some of them. The goal is to have a series of free (you need to set up a login, but that is it) and paid for tools that are IPv6 specific that help you learn, plan, design, and architect IPv6 networks. So here is the current list of tools, you can check them out yourself on the website.

Free tier:

IPv6 Compatibility Checker (technically a different website, we launched it before the new company website design change)
Network Assessment
Deployment Analytics
IETF RFC IPv6 Reference Guide
IPv6 Packet Builder
NDP State Machine Simulator
IPv6 BGP Viewer

In the paid for tier (which is in beta and we are not currently charging for it but you do need to request access) there is:

IPv6 Address Planner
IPv6 Feature Gap Analyzer
IPv6 Adoption Planner
Training Hub

We would love feedback on the tools, if they are useful, and if there are other tools you think might be useful that are not already available in the community.

- Ed

IPv6 Compatibility

2025-10-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

My company HexaBuild launched a new community resource site at IPv6compatibility.com and if you are trying to figure out if a given set of network related hardware and software supports IPv6, you can use the site to figure that out. Just a quick post to let everyone know it is up and available.

Some quick notes about the site. We use Replit AI to do the work on figuring out capabilities. That means, by definition, it isn't perfect, hasn't been checked by any IPv6 expert, and may have errors. But, the trade off is it is free and relatively low maintenance for us. Also, just the process of looking through the features and functions that the site is looking for will help you learn more about what questions and features you should be asking for from your vendors!

Feel free to post feedback through the site and let us know products or features that are missing or you would like to see.

- Ed

Hedgehog is the AI network solution builder - plus more

2024-07-24T09:00:00.000-07:00

If you are actively looking to build out AI network infrastructure and want to utilize white box, cost effective switching, one of the challenges you have is what software you will use to design, deploy, operate and manage those network switches, because doing that by hand via a CLI will not be fun. Hedgehog wants to be the software you use to solve this problem, along with a few more use cases.

They kicked off their Network Field Day 35 (#NFD35) presentation with the pitch of saying Hedgehog is the AI network solution builder. They are the software to make this happen, but you can definitely use them for more than that, so you have to read between the lines to get the bigger picture on where they fit in the market.

I don't ding them for riding the AI wave, that is what is happening at the moment. And they aren't claiming they are "using AI" to build or deploy the fabric. They are saying you can use their solution to build out network infrastructure easily that makes running AI workloads faster, easier, with better performance, and not necessarily need a network engineering team to do it, which is pretty attractive for companies that are mainly investing the money on teams that can build out interesting AI models and data sets.

The pitch is that folks who are building and running AI workloads likely grew up and are used to cloud first tooling and services. They want an API, and for networking, a VPC like concept to build out what they need to run their AI workloads. Because Hedgehog is providing that user experience, but for whitebox, on-premises environments, the argument is that your existing cloud AI teams can easily get things up and running and have a look, feel, and workflow that matches what they do in a public cloud.

I must admit, I have no idea how many companies are running AI workloads and want to avoid recurring cloud costs and have decided to deploy colocated or dedicated infrastructure on their own to help drive down costs. I think that is the intersection of two customer markets in a small Venn diagram overlap, but clearly Hedgehog can provide a solutions for those folks.

I think the compelling story is the fact that you can build an Ethernet fabric easily with the same workflow and concepts as what you are used to with a public cloud service like AWS or Azure for networking. This is important for organizations that are trying to streamline their AI workload processes and want to leverage the cost saving of running AI workloads on fixes capital investments versus recurring costs in public cloud. It still leverages VXLAN and EVPN, but it is abstracted away from the operator. The reality is, this is where network automation is going. A controller that builds out Ethernet fabric solutions in a standard way where you don't need to touch or maintain the underlay and an API for those that want to consume the fabric can use to set it up they way they need it with a simple abstraction.

Let me repeat that - this is where network automation is going. I'm not saying Hedgehog is the only way to do this, but they demonstrate where the industry is going to go and how the network industry is going to change.

It is also worth noting that the solution is built on Kubernetes but you don't need to know anything about that, it is just under the hood. The other part that is interesting is that the software is all open source. Their goal is to provide a fully automated network operations solution at a reasonable cost.

So who is the target?

I think, given what Hedgehog can do, and what capabilities it is providing, the target customer is really organizations that want to run networks that can scale and change without having to spend a crazy amount for network architects and engineers to design and deploy. In addition, the solution is cost conscious, and those that are willing to purchase white box networking hardware to help drive down their capital costs compared to buying a Cisco, Juniper, Arista, or other mainstream network switch solution will be an idea customer. By having open source software, low commodity hardware, and the focus of the cost in annual software maintenance, it will be very appealing to shops that run lean, with low overhead and staff.

So where is Hedgehog going?

It is clear that Hedgehog can only really innovate at the pace that network white box platform have the right supported capabilities. That being said, having a service gateway to make their cloud like experience consistent with what the public clouds provide will be critical. The DPU integration will give them scale and security that will be beyond what most commercial network solutions are providing today. And finally, having flow scheduling ability from a DPU gives them even more capabilities to optimize AI workloads.

Is there room in the market for Hedgehog? Yes. Will they likely get bought up to help a larger network vendor who wants to own that market? Yep, that will likely happen at some point. For now, if you are looking for where the network automation landscape is going, you might want to check out what Hedgehog is providing the industry with open source, industry standard network automation through API, and the key value provided via annual software maintenance. I'll be keeping an eye on what they do.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Network Field Day, a Tech Field Day event, was voluntary and I was invited to participate. Tech Field Day events are hosted by Gestalt IT (part of The Futurum Group) and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I don't accept gifts but I do ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes, technical missteps, incorrect opinions, and grammar errors are my own.

Intel - Is it an IPU or a DPU or what?

2024-07-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Intel has developed and sold classic Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs) for a long time, but many might not be as familiar with their product offerings in the SmartNIC and more advanced NIC categories. Intel breaks down their product offering as follows:

Intel presented on the work they are doing around their Infrastructure Process Unit (IPU), which they refer to as an "Improved DPU" or Data Processing Unit, which fits in the general bucket of "SmartNIC" and is developed by the Intel NEX Cloud Connectivity Group. This post focuses on that, since that is what they presented at #NFD35. I must admit, I am interested in hearing more about their AI Optimized solutions as I am sure they are being leveraged by some very large organizations for interesting workloads, perhaps a future NFD?

There were two features in the IPU that are something infrastructure engineers should know about. Specifically, the capability to build out reliable transport between two hosts who both have an Intel IPUs. The Ethernet fabric no longer needs to run special queuing and management to deal with congestion and microburst issues but instead, the IPU running Falcon, and leveraging programable congestion control, deals with it. Effectively, Falcon is the method for reliable transport over an existing lossy fabric which brings a lot of options to companies who may not want to build out a dedicated fabric for running storage or AI workloads.

In a shared fabric environment, it can be difficult to structure and provision all the access ports with the right queuing and policies. Given that difficultly, it might make sense, for smaller networks and diverse compute environments, to simple purchase the more advanced IPU's for the servers that require them and have the IPU deal with the lossy fabric issues.

The other feature was demonstrating the use of the IPU for general compute capabilities and also AI inference, and the markets that could potentially use the solution. They are definitely targeting a wide audience of infrastructure engineers who might need to run services and workloads but might not have the capacity, budget, or fabric design to support what they are trying to do. Intel sees the following areas as potential good use cases for their IPU.

You can watch the overview presentation from Thomas Scheibe w/ Intel at:

If you want more information about their Reliable Transport over Lossy Fabrics, which is called Falcon, then check out:

Intel also provided some actual demos and you can watch those at:

What is always a little interesting about Intel and their solutions, is that typically, you and I aren't buying directly from Intel. You are normally purchasing their products through a distributor or hardware supplier like HPE, or Dell, or SuperMicro. But Intel still wants infrastructure engineers to know what their products are capable of, so when you are building out the next server, you are picking the right SmartNIC for your specific needs. So it makes sense they are out providing this information directly to the public, or NFD events in this case, so you can pick and choose the right solution for your Data Center and Enterprise server networking needs.

- Ed

Network Field Day 35

2024-07-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

Network Field Day 35 (#NFD35) is happening July 10-11, 2024 and I am fortunate enough to be a delegate for the event. You can check out the full event schedule at the NFD35 website. The sponsors list has been growing so checking the site is the best until the event starts. I recommend watching live if you can and I believe LinkedIn is likely the best place to catch stuff.

So far the sponsor line up is:

I will be attending in person, and I will be doing my best to take notes and ask interesting questions. Obviously, there is no way we can cover all the questions that those who are watching remote might have, but hit us up on X/Twitter using #NFD35 or via the Tech Field Day slack channel or even via LinkedIn and we will all do our best to try and bring up the point.

So, there you go, let's get ready to have some serious fun with NFD35 as the delegate line up is pretty impressive! If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or via LinkedIn. If you are interested in being a delegate, you can check out the website, they have all the details up there.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT (part of The Futurum Group) and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I don't accept gifts but I do ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes, technical missteps, incorrect opinions, and grammar errors are my own.

Nile's changing up how Enterprises design, build, and consume Access Networks at Network Field Day 32

2023-08-07T09:00:00.002-07:00

Nile presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their Enterprise Networking solutions. Nile has built out a set of networking solutions that focuses on the enterprise and commercial market and they are selling the solution in a Network as a Service model. The overview of what they provide:

Wired and Wireless LAN as a Service
Guaranteed Network Performance
Zero Trust
IT Simplicity

It seems they are competitors to Meraki, Mist, and Aruba from an enterprise solution offering and to Ubiquiti and Microtik in the commercial market. All of these competitors have strong market positions and install bases. This is a simplistic comparison, but for the purpose of understanding what market groups they are potentially suited for, it works just fine.

Here is their overview:

There are several more YouTube videos available, you can find them all over at the Tech Field Day 32 Nile page.

But in typical NFD fashion, the most interesting and relevant session ended up being the last video and the poor presenter was given the least amount of time because everyone else was unable to keep on track prior.

Note: If Nile presents at another field day, I suggest they START with this demo, focus on doing Q&A around it and expand everything else after it. Honestly, the first 30-45 mins of the overall timeslot was a waste of time and could have been cut (except the marketing people likely wanted that content - stop listening to them, you can record that stuff on your own, you don't need a bunch of delegates in the room for that part). If you are going to watch anything, watch this one:

My quick thoughts on what Nile presented:

Of course the IPv6 question was asked and they built a new generation of networking gear and solution without IPv6 as a first class citizen. I don't know if that is really forgivable in the current market. While I understand the US Federal Government is not their primary customer, or even a secondary, there will definitely be organizations that need IPv6. It is just such a glaring misstep I can't really take the rest of the product seriously, so you know my bias going into this.

They also need to explain and position their place in the market a bit more clearly. A simple elevator pitch that says something like: "We are Meraki or Mist generation 2.0" or something similar to give a reference point. I get that they are doing Network as a Service (NaaS) and their billing/revenue model is slightly different but it puts them in front of the right general audience. The current pitch and explanation is too broad and doesn't narrow the field for buyers to understand what they do and why.

Effectively, they are wrapping together hardware, software, support, and installer/operator easy of administration in a recurring revenue model. I'm not sure that is revolutionary at this point. They did invest to brand their own hardware solution. I'm not sure putting simple diagrams on the equipment makes it unique in terms of IT Simplicity. Their management UI looks like a combo of Mist, Meraki and Ubiquiti so nothing super unique going on there, though that might be a plus, people who have used those other solutions can figure theirs out a bit faster.

I will be honest, I am not 100% sure what the large/important differentiator is for Nile. I either missed the key points in the presentation or they need to hone their message of how they are different, unique, and valuable for a customer. It just wasn't clear to me why I would want them versus any other product solution set out there right now. It should be the first, second, and third thing they talk about. I'm not even sure it was mentioned specifically.

I will keep an eye on Nile and what they are doing, but honestly, just like with Meraki, I won't take them seriously until they can work with IPv6 as a fully supported networking protocol.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.

Broadcom's AI Networking Solutions at Networking Field Day 32

2023-08-01T09:00:00.002-07:00

Broadcom presented at Networking Field Day 32 on July 26, 2023 and they presented on their AI Networking solutions. These are products and architectures that address the needs of those building out AI data center focused networks. Obviously the design will work for regular data center workloads too. albeit, suboptimal because the design is focused on addressing AI workloads and not a more general workload. The attributes that Broadcom define for what makes an AI Network unique are:

Fewer flows (low entropy)
High bandwidth flows (elephant flows due to the large amount of data sets being moved around)
Synchronized and bursty traffic
Links are saturated in micro-seconds (<<RTT)
Training jobs run for long periods of time (hours/days)
Tail latency impacts job completion time significantly

And they shared some interesting info about "time spent in network" is impacted by:

Transient oversubscription
Flow collisions and link failures
Incast - many GPUs sends into one or a few GPU(s)

Broadcom says the solution is to build a Clos fabric that makes use of a receiver-based credit control process that can pace the senders accurately. This means it is impossible to oversubscribe the Clos fabric and therefore you can leverage techniques like packet spraying with receiver ordering. It is worth watching the presentation on YouTube to understand what they are doing and why. You can check that out here:

There are specific videos on the Tomahawk AI Interconnect here:

And also on Jericho3 AI here:

And their wrap up on AI/ML Data Center Fabric solutions can be found here:

My quick thoughts on what Broadcom presented:

I wasn't aware (more likely I haven't been paying attention to what is happening in AI/ML like I should be) that there was this much specific network design work going into addressing AI workloads. While I understand there are a lot of AI/ML projects, I wasn't aware that so many private firms might want this solution architecture for their own needs versus running on leased cloud models.

Clearly there is a pricing advantage to running stuff at scale on your own hardware (in terms of reduced network data ingress/egress costs, compute cycles, and having dedicated GPU access) otherwise Broadcom wouldn't be building these sorts of solutions. It seems most of the large scale cloud providers have built something similar on their own or have requested that Broadcom address a gap in what traditional Ethernet fabrics can provide.

What will be interesting to me is if this is a short term industry change to address a narrow vertical or if this will become the new default Ethernet fabric architecture because AI/ML workloads will become common place DC workloads. I'm not convinced it will go that way, perhaps a hybrid of specific AI/ML Ethernet fabrics that are L3 connected to traditional DC focused Ethernet fabrics to attempt to give an organization the best of both worlds.

You can also get Drew Conry-Murray's thoughts on Broadcom's presentation over at his Packet Pushers blog post.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD32. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own along with the ideas and thoughts.

IPv6-only has become a thing

2023-06-21T09:00:00.005-07:00

Outside of posting content around Tech Field Day events I occasionally participate in, my blog hasn't seen a lot of activity. Mainly because I have been posting content over at the Infoblox IPv6 Center of Excellence or via the IPv6 Buzz Podcast. I recommend you check both those out, it isn't just me generating that content but also Scott Hogg, Tom Coffeen, Cody Christman, Tim Martin, and other great IPv6 content creators.

I did want to highlight one observation I have made starting at the end of 2022 and continuing throughout 2023 and that is the noticeable increase of discussions around IPv6-only. In the past, IPv6-only was a smaller corner case for many organizations as everyone thought the natural progression for IPv6 adoption (IPv6 transition) was to move to dual-stack first and figure out the deployment and operational issues and then shut off IPv4. The problem with this workflow was twofold. First, it is difficult to determine operational issues in dual-stack networks as happy eyeballs hides many of those issues from you. And second is that no one actually turns off IPv4, which defeats the whole purpose of adopting IPv6 for the long run.

There is no denying that part of the reason for some much IPv6-only conversation is due to the IPv6 transition requirement that OMB published regarding moving to IPv6-only. Deploying dual-stack doesn't help an organization meet the requirements defined in the memo, which leaves these departments and agencies to figure out how to do IPv6-only. There are also now more Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies who are having significant IPv4 address supply issues and realizing they only want to get around those is to either buy more costly public IPv4 address space or adopt IPv6-only to slow the burn rate of IPv4 usage.

Every organization has their unique business and technical requirements. IPv6-only may only address problems in one of those problems spaces. But it is a tool that more organizations are realizing they should have in their tool belt and that they can get wins in both business and technical requirements. For example, IPv6-only makes merger and acquisitions much easier to perform as making use of GUA space guarantees uniqueness of addresses, meaning it is a simple routing and peering problem to integrate the networks and not a NAT or re-addressing project that might take years to complete. It also means the timeframe to perform a merger or to integrate an acquired company drops dramatically. This has profound impact on the financial structure of the deal which is something that should not be overlooked.

I think it is important for people to realize there are not a lot of people with industry experience deploying IPv6-only networks. So, be cautious when talking with vendors, consultants, and industry peers about what to do. Very few people have the experience and design skills to navigate everything that goes into making IPv6-only a reality. I have interacted with a lot of vendors and consultants recently who claim they can do it, but the only IPv6 they have deployed is dual-stack and they have serious gaps in their knowledge and in the solutions that will actually work. So, do your homework and buyer beware. I will try and post some IPv6-only resources as I run across them (or just write them myself!)

- Ed

2022 - Year in review and a look ahead at 2023

2022-12-09T09:00:00.002-08:00

It seems my blogging has fallen off a lot since co-founding HexaBuild and working on IPv6 full time. I wanted to at least get a post out this year talking about some of the interesting things I have observed in the industry and note if I think they will be trends or simple market changes that won't have much impact.

First, regarding IPv6, it appears that IPv6-only design and architecture is accelerating at a rapid pace and I anticipate that will continue into 2023 and 2024. This is driven in part by the White House OMB mandate but also my the cost structure of IPv4 and the open market to obtain IPv4 addresses that have a clean reputation and are available to use immediate. While enterprise organizations will ponder over IPv6 in 2023 and 2024 and potentially kick off projects, they will, for the most part have limited deployments. The exceptions will be organizations that are consuming all their RFC 1918 address space and their public IPv4 address space due to rapid public cloud expansion. This has been a huge driving force around IPv6 discussions to try and help reduce the rate of IPv4 address space consumption. I don't see that changing in 2023 or 2024 but with some organizations repatriating their workloads, it may slow down.

Second, I think automation is the only way to safely adopt IPv6 for larger organizations and they need to invest in tooling, platforms and their staff to make that happen. Given the complexity of dual-stack for many organizations, getting a consistent deployment method that reduces typing/character mistakes is really important for IPv6. Since many organizations are moving that direction already, it is a natural fit and means that automation processes include IPv6 from day one.

Finally, security is becoming interesting again and Zero Trust is changing how team think about deploying and building services. Zero Trust is another natural fit for incorporating IPv6 early on in the process to ensure you can support all your potential network ingress/egress protocols. Thinking through the dual-stack solution and projecting that to IPv6-only allows you to work through many of the corner cases and potential access issues that end clients would run into in the real world.

So, 2023 will likely be a lot of work around IPv6-only, automation, and Zero Trust, is going to be my guess. Of course more cloud, but I think that is just a given going forward. What are everyone else's thoughts about what 2023 will likely consist of for technology focus?

- Ed

Kentik - Get Observability and Monitoring Under Control

2021-10-04T09:00:00.002-07:00

Kentik presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 15, 2021 and I think Kentik is on the right journey around doing observability and monitoring for enterprise networks. They understand they have to support all the traditional capabilities within networks but they also need to have full support and capabilities for public cloud services. I was very interested in what they are doing with Kentik Firehose which aggregates message bus/queue, observability, real-time analytics and data lake sources and provides telemetry and context. This seems like a super useful tool for companies who have a wide variety of cloud and other systems generating data. Check out Avi Feedman's presentation, it is worth listening to their strategy and how they want to address these issues that almost all companies are going to be facing.

They had a pretty impressive list of new features and capabilities. I think their focus on cloud to on-premises integration is going to be critical.

Kentik also showed off what they are doing for Observability for Cloud Networkers. This is an extremely hard space right now. Each public cloud provider does networking and the associated logging, telemetry and observability data differently. So it is a major pain to integrate it and have some sort of end to end solution that actually helps you determine what the problem or problems actually are so I think they are on to something.

For now, Kentik is a company to keep an eye on and see if their innovate in the right areas to address customers needs. It sure looks like they are heading in the right direction and I think they have a useful product that helps replace a lot of legacy logging and monitoring solutions we have typically deployed in the past with something more modern and extensible.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about Kentik. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

ZPE - A New Swiss Army Knife Networking Product

2021-09-27T09:00:00.003-07:00

ZPE presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 16, 2021 and I will be honest, at first I couldn't figure out where to put ZPE in terms of a product and service category. As they were a first time NFD presenter and I had not heard of them before I was asking myself, are they a remote console server replacement for the likes of Raritan, OpenGear, and others? Are they an SD-WAN solution? Do you use them for routing and switching? Are they really focus on Out-of-Band (OOB) or Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)? It turns out you can use them for all or just part of those things.

In my current role, I am a consumer of remote console and remote access solutions, mainly for lab and proof of concept purposes, as that is how we help many of our customer in validating their IPv6 configurations. For our IPv6 training at HexaBuild we will more commonly use Apache Guacamole and provide access directly via ssh, web and remote desktop which are all natively supported in Guacamole.

While ZPE can certainly do many of these functions, there is a far more compelling use case for organizations that have many distributed branch locations and do not have remote hands or the cost of truck rolls to support the site are very high. Rene Neumann gave an presentation on the ZPE Systems' Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud to do Branch Orchestration. I recommend checking out this part of the presentation to learn how you can leverage ZPE, their cloud options and drive toward Infrastructure as Code from the earliest points of deployment.

What is interesting about what ZPE is doing is starting from Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) without necessarily having to build out all the initial infrastructure you require to get many ZTP solutions up and running. They combine the ZPE Cloud and on-premises gear deployment to make this Day 0 to Day 1 to Day 2 workflow actually make sense. If you have ever tried to do an initial deployment of a network you know how hard it is to automate all that work. At a minimum you need an Intel NUC or a VM on your laptop to run all the services, store initial code, along with templates and configuration files. ZPE takes care of doing all that workflow. They can't build your configuration files for you but they can make it possible for you to load those and set things up without the need to sending someone to the site.

I am glad someone is providing some competition for Raritan, OpenGear and Cradlepoint - it will likely push them all to provide better capabilities and at the same time put some pressure on traditional networking vendors to do better around Day 0 to Day 2 lifecycle management.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about ZPE. He covers a lot of the other capabilities so it is worth a read! A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Arista - Open Source Network Automation and Tooling

2021-09-23T09:00:00.006-07:00

Arista presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I was most excited about the presentation that Fred Hsu gave regarding Arista's Next-Generation Automation Architectures.

Having a vendor share how they see customers putting together a set of automation tools, frameworks and workflow is super helpful. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of getting started in the network automation journey is where to start. What tools, what language to learn (Python, Go, Tcl?), what editor/IDE to use (PyCharm or VS Code?), what environment setup? I draw the analogy to getting started in biking. The best way to start is to have a friend let you borrow a bike, provide the initial gear, pick an appropriate beginner level place to bike and get out and follow their lead. It is very similar for network automation. I don't need to start on a $10,000 mountain bike with high end expensive gear and bomb down a super advanced single track course when I have never ridden a bike before, it just makes no sense! In fact, it sets you up for failure. I can pretty much guarantee you are going to crash into a tree, go up and over your handlebars or have some other equally horrible experience. And you will feel you wasted your money and the experience will sour you to trying it again.

Arista is providing an initial roadmap of how they see the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in the network automation journey. This consists of a set of tools they see customers using along with support for how they think they can add value to customers.

I think it is super important that Arista is sharing this information with their customers and community. It means that those that are not Innovators or Early Adopters (Crossing the Chasm reference) can have more specific guidance how how to achieve Infrastructure as Code because we are currently in the Early Majority phase of network automation.

You can obviously swap out a specific tool for something your organization might have already adopted. For instance, they list GitLab for code repository and workflow orchestration but maybe you are a GitHub customer already. That is fine, you just end up using GitHub. The point being is they are providing a reference for building Network CI/CD pipeline to help you on the journey. Being specific is actually helpful in the beginning. Just like not having to figure out all the details when you want to get into biking to see if you like it, someone sharing and showing you the basics is incredibly useful.

I did like seeing Arista call out some unique tools that network engineers might not know as much about if they are not developing and/or operating network automation solutions. Things like Batfish which does network modeling (it is a network configuration analysis tool really) and Open Policy Agent or OPA (which reminds me in many ways of Terraform from Hashicorp) that provides for a unified toolset and framework for policy across the cloud native stack and any company who wants to extend it to their environment. There is even a VS Code extension to develop, test, debug, and analyze policies!

Finally, they briefly talk about some of the work they are doing with the team at Network to Code around Nautobot for single source of truth and how that interfaces with Cloud Vision Portal (CVP). What I was pleased with about the presentation was while they talked about CVP, it was only to talk about integration and where it can help. While CVP can do many of the roles these other tools provide, they focused the effort around how the CI/CD pipeline is being developed, regardless of CVP. So hats off to Arista for not being heavy handed and pitching product the entire time.

You can also check out Girard Kavelines' post about Juniper at TechHouse570 - Networking Field Day - Day 1 Recap. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since this is Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Juniper - Mist API and Automation with Postman

2021-09-20T09:00:00.021-07:00

Juniper presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on network automation that Ryan and Jake did, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on network automation and APIs. Even if you are staying current, it is worth a watch honestly.

Jake showed off Postman (which is an open source tool and is an API platform for building and using APIs) and how they are leveraging the "Power of the Juniper API". More importantly, they provided a Postman Collection Runner (the Collection Runner allows you to run sets of requests in a specified sequence - this link explains the runner) for free which is really amazing. You can find the Mist Runner Collection (this is the link to their actual collection) up on GitHub. This means that folks who are trying to get started with automation in networking don't have to start from zero. This helps with the stress of the situation where your management team expects you to be at automation hero level in a week or two. Jake does a full hands on demo of his runner deploying a campus fabric from a simple CSV initialization file (he provides example files too.) It really is pretty cool. Using a Collection to do workflow and automation when you are leveraging an API makes a lot of sense. And when a vendor releases for free how to leverage a tool like this to help make you life easier, it is worth checking out. You can see from the Postman UI, it is really straight forward.

You do need to create a free account with Postman, but you have to do that for things like GitHub too, and the value you get from this tool make it worth the inconveniences of doing so.

In addition, Mist has up on the GitHub repo the Mist API Cookbook. It is a good way to start figuring out how to use the Mist API. I recommend grabbing that to start exploring the API with Postman. Even if you just want to explore and learn about how an API can be useful versus doing some CLI scripting, this is a good way to figure that out. The repo contains simple PDF files that cover things like EVPN to Access Layer deployment, for instance. As you can see from the screenshot, very straight forward:

I'm excited to see vendors sharing their tooling, scripts and examples for the community to learn from. It is super difficult to get started in network API and automation when you also have to run and operate a day to day network. Being able to leverage what other smart engineers have put time and energy into in invaluable in the learning part of the journey. I look forward to seeing more content from Juniper in this space.

You can also check out Girard Kavelines' post about Juniper at TechHouse570 - Networking Field Day - Day 1 Recap, Jason Gintert's post on Automation and Assurance of the AI Driven Campus with Juniper Networks and Tim Bertino's post on NFD26 – Experience First Networking w/ Juniper. You can listen to Drew Conry-Murray and I chat about Juniper's NFD26 presentation on the Packet Pushers Briefings in Brief podcast. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since this is Suicide Prevention week - Juniper was kind enough to do so). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Network Field Day 26 -

2021-09-10T09:00:00.007-07:00

Excuse the bit of pre-ramble before the actual NFD26 content:

It is a bit unusual to do back-to-back Network Field Day event, mainly because diversity in delegates is a good thing for the community and for the vendors presenting. It means a greater mix of opinions, use cases, and influence around a topic, the technology and how it is being applied to the market. Those are all wins (at least I think so) until something like a worldwide pandemic makes in person events difficult to impossible to do and also the reality that delegate's time is a harder commodity now. There are two aspects as a delegate that are important that go unspoken, but given the current situation, I want to say specifically out loud.

1. You get access and a platform to interface with vendors because you give your time to participate and;

2. also because you get a dialog going in the community about what you saw and heard!

The second part has been the challenge as of late. There have been a lack of blog posts, of YouTube videos, of missing podcast content, etc.. Honestly, like many of you, I am not sitting in my car for hours on end to listen to some of my favorite podcast shows because I no longer commute to an office location or to customer sites. I do still listen while going on my daily walks, or for the very short drives to the grocery store or gym. But honestly, my listening is way down, as I assume many of the rest of you are too.

How does this relate to Network Field Day 26?

It relates in a few ways. The delegates who are going to get invited back to participate in Tech Field Day are actually producing the content.* There are delegates who are able to free up their schedule to find the time to participate, and that is a good thing. But it appears, a good number can't find the time to do the second part. The reality is, that the second part is WHY the vendors choose to do Tech Field Day. Because the get feedback, community engagement and an open dialog about their product, how it applies in the technology landscape and what practitioners think of it. Without the second part, the first part doesn't happen. This is the reason you are seeing some repeat Field Day delegates, because they know the second part is just as important as the first. Okay, off the ramble, I just wanted everyone to know that, content and doing the work matters.

* - note: I also know that many of the delegates have a policy that if you don't have something nice to say about a technology, solution or product, then don't say anything. I get that, but you can still write something about the event overall to acknowledge the participation and effort. I know that personally, I tend not to write about companies that don't have a reasonable IPv6 answer and solution. Other delegates have their "thing" too.

- Now to the NFD26 post!

Network Field Day 26 (NFD26) is happening Sept 14-16, 2021. You can check out the full event schedule at the NFD26 website. The sponsors list has been growing so checking the site is the best until the event starts. I recommend watching live if you can, the playback later doesn't line up with the live twitter interaction so sometimes it is hard to get all the context.

First point, I thinks this NFD has a particularly strong list of delegates. So the interaction will be excellent, and I anticipate some of the blogging content will be good as a result. Also, because this is a virtual event, the fact that I know some many of the delegates on a personal level already means the event won't feel as awkward as many of the vendor events I have watched where you could tell this is the first time they have worked or even seen each other!

Second, I am going to say upfront that not addressing IPv6 is a big negative for me for the sponsors. To repeat my NFD25 blog post:
I won't be satisfied with some of the dismissive answers of the past like "our customers aren't asking for it" or "it is on our 3 year roadmap" or "we have IPv6 support, but I'm not familiar with it, can we get back to you?" Those presenting should know and understand IPv6 at this point, and it is NOT my job to explain it to you, justify why it is needed, or what the market for it is, seriously, that ship has sailed. We are in the early majority stage for IPv6 adoption and it will only accelerate from here.

So, there you go, let's get ready to have some serious fun with NFD26! If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or keep up with the activity via twitter by following the hashtag #NFD26. If you are interested in being a delegate, you can check out the website, they have all the details up there.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since this is Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Intel Silicon Photonics - the way forward

2021-05-19T09:00:00.001-07:00

Intel presented at Networking Field Day on May 13, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on Silicon Photonics, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on optical hardware. As a networking engineer, optics are a big part of what you deal with in designing and building networks. More importantly, it is likely the most expensive device per unit cost you will be buying for a regular data center deployment, or any deployment for that matter. So having an understanding of what is happening is critical to helping your company invest correctly and likely save some money in the process.

Some industry trends over the last 5-10 years are starting to dramatically change the landscape. If you are still doing MMF in your DC and still installing that as your primary fiber plant, it might be time to reconsider. Most DC builds are doing SMF for a wide variety of reasons. For today's 10/25/40/50/100/400G connections, SMF is likely more cost effective and gives you more options on how to build out your DC cable runs. To back this up, let's look at some data.

One of the interesting parts of what Intel shared was some trends on where Ethernet transceivers are going. Basically, 100G and 400G SMF is where things are heading and you need to plan and invest accordingly. And 400G SMF transceivers will start breaking away by 2023. This matches what I am seeing in the data center deployments I am involved with for customers. But it is nice to see industry data matching what you are seeing in the field.

So how is Intel innovating in the traditional transceiver business? They have found a way to produce a much more predictable, reliable and cost effective transceiver. I learned a lot from this presentation, and the surprise was how traditional transceivers are actually built. I had no idea some much manual and potential error prone process went into these devices. The traditional transceivers were more like custom kit cars versus modern car manufacturing. All the pieces have to fit and work and be precision placed and aligned. If any of that fails or doesn't work the transceiver fails. Compare that to an integrated optic which has everything designed and built as one discrete unit in silicon, it just makes so much sense that this is a better design and model for optics going forward. Check out the difference:

Then there is the next leap to changing how we think about optical completely. The move to co-packaged optics and changing from a pluggable format to just having the right optical interface on the device. It is a bit of a throw back to the days when an Ethernet interface or a Serialized interface was how you ordered your router and what was on that router was what you got. Modular interfaces wasn't a thing until later when multiple Ethernet quantity and multiple serial interface types were needed and making them modular was more cost effective. So, the density and cooling requirements for these devices will be much better than sticking with a pluggable design.

Intel has built a co-packaged optics Ethernet Switch to demonstrate what this could look like. Don't be surprised if this starts to become more common, especially when the higher density 100G/400G switches become the standard.

I had no idea how much innovation was happening in this space. Clearly Intel's investment in Silicon Photonics is going to change how networks are built, how much they cost and how fiber plant will be built today and the future. Check out the presentation and let me know what you think!

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD25. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.

Network Field Day 25 May 12-14, 2021 - A Changing Networking Landscape

2021-05-05T15:00:00.001-07:00

Here we go, Network Field Day 25 (NFD25) is May 12-14, 2021. It is a good line up of presenters and delegates so check out the full event schedule at the NFD25 website. First point, I thinks this NFD shows the changing networking landscape. Yes, some big network brands are still the focus but it is interesting seeing the list of presenters. What previously were second or third options for many companies are being first or second. Second point, the influence of a larger single vendor is slowing changing and the ecosystem is changing with it. I'm exciting to hear what all these sponsors have to say. Below I have some quick thoughts on some of the companies that I know something about.

Aruba/HPE - Just keeping up with all the changes and improvements Aruba has been doing can be tough now. They have built an impressive networking business around the Aruba product family and I believe they are a serious network vendor that enterprises should be evaluating. I'm looking forward to hearing what updates and product innovations they might have to share.

Juniper - It is going to be interesting to see if Juniper can make the sort of inroads that Aruba did in the Enterprise networking space. With Mist, they have a real chance and expanding their campus networking solutions seems to be a big goal for the company. I think their challenge is winning back trust after really stepping away from that market to focus on their core routing platforms. I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of talk around AI/ML.

Nokia - I have been hearing positive things around Nokia's networking products for a long time. I unfortunately haven't had the opportunity to actually work on and use their gear. I am hoping Nokia is out to change that and perhaps provide easier ways for those of us who aren't as familiar with their products to have the opportunity to learn more and perhaps see some good demos and use cases where they really shine.

Obviously, I will be asking each company their IPv6 plans, capabilities, use cases and such. I think there is a lot more weight to the question this NFD because of the White House OMB Memo M-21-07. Federal agencies need to put a focus on getting IPv6 deployed, and products that don't support IPv6 are going to have issues. So I won't be satisfied with some of the dismissive answers of the past like "our customers aren't asking for it" or "it is on our 3 year roadmap" or "we have IPv6 support, but I'm not familiar with it, can we get back to you?" Those presenting should know and understand IPv6 at this point, and it is NOT my job to explain it to you, justify why it is needed, or what the market for it is, seriously, that ship has sailed. We are in the early majority stage for IPv6 adoption and it will only accelerate from here.

If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or keep up with the activity via twitter by following the hashtag #NFD25.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD25. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved. In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.

Security Field Day 4 - Cisco Security Update - Tetration all the things

2020-10-22T09:00:00.004-07:00

This time around Security Field Day 4 was all about Cisco Tetration. It seems they are focusing on how to solve security policy creation and management via big data and machine learning.

Rob Tappenden did the overview of Tetration, giving the background about why the product is around and why it is important. The goal is securing application workloads across on-premises Data Centers, Campus ang Cloud. It ingests IP data and is able to make policy enforcement decisions based on that data set, which is collected and analyzed over time. Tetration is doing data correlation and pattern matching to help define policies and also to determine if an application is currently matching an existing policy already defined.

Here is Rob's video:

Tim Garner then walked through the details around the policy process and operations of how Tetration does what it does. It was an interesting demo to watch, mainly because I have not had the chance to be hands on with Tetration at all myself. You can learn a lot about how a product functions by watching others use it. Tetration leverages both an agent and also flow data. The combination is likely the approach many with take as it gives the most complete view of the network. The demo had systems running in AWS with the agent installed, therefore exposing all the IP and network connectivity. The agent is able to do policy enforcement based off what you publish through Tetration and it is possible to run a simulation of your policy to see the impact prior to deploying it.

Here is Tim's video:

Then a more developer focused presentation was given by Remi Philippe, walking through a standard CI/CD workflow using Github and Jenkins to show how a developer would integrate and use/interact with Tetration. It was useful to see, but I am skeptical how many companies have operational team that are adopting Tetration and teaming with their developers in this way. I'm sure they are out there, but I am guessing that the majority of application developers are for more interesting in APM solutions like AppDynamics (owned by Cisco), New Relic, DataDog or Dynatrace than accommodating the operations team around Tetration. Because APM is code integrated and has an agent, I am doubting the desire of the app teams to run multiple agents on a host. The moment something goes wrong in an environment, the first thing that is turned off is security policy, firewalls and anything that might prevent the application to talk on the wire to each other. If that fixes it, then that agent or process isn't turned back on again.

Here is Remi's video:

I believe, over the long term, Tetration has to be integrated with AppDynamics and ThousandEyes (owned by Cisco) and have a single agent able to provide data to all those services. It also needs to support third party APMs because not all teams chose the same tooling and Cisco needs to open up there ecosystem to support that. I'm not sure that Tetration really isn't just the big data part (with a security angle) that all the APM providers already include as part of their product and that Cisco, over the long haul with have to reposition the produce around that story. I am speculating that it is a feature of a bigger product family over time. Only time will tell.

I will update the post when the video becomes available but you should be able to find them here when they post. You can also check out some of the other delegate's thoughts on the presentation such as Michael Davis, go check out his thoughts.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in XFD4. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event if travel was involved. In addition, sometimes small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.

Security Field Day 4 - A quick virtual hit of security

2020-10-20T09:00:00.006-07:00

It has been awhile since I paid close attention to what is going on in the security space so I am excited to catch a few sessions with the Tech Field Day team for their Security Field Day 4 event happening tomorrow, Oct 21 virtually. You can catch everything live tomorrow and ask questions via twitter, just use the hashtag #XFD4 and cc: @techfieldday so those who are participating can ask your question live to the presenters.

Looks like the day will be with Cisco, and I think they need to impress, there are a lot of security companies out there with fantastic brands and products, this is a tough market. I hope they bring out the ThousandEyes team to talk about integration with AppDynamics to elevate Application level security and end to end monitoring and telemetry. I guess we will see what they have to say shortly!

Join me - you can hit the main website at https://techfieldday.com/ to watch live, it is 11-12 and 1-3pm PDT.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in XFD4. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event if travel was involved. In addition, sometimes small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.

Cloud Field Day 7 - VMware Cloud on AWS

2020-05-04T09:00:00.002-07:00

For those who are traditional VMware enterprise customers you are likely comfortable with their products and technologies and rely on it daily to help keep your company up and running in a highly available configuration. Adoption of public cloud, that is a different story for many. If you have not been keeping up with the innovations and use cases around public cloud you might be caught off guard by the adoption and scale that it is providing to many enterprise customers, some of them might even be your competitors. VMware recognized this gap and decided to brave the waters by partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make VMware Cloud on AWS. For anyone who has followed the public cloud market, you will be familiar with how daunting that can be for a well established enterprise software company like VMware. A lot of other software companies have tried and failed to move their solutions and buying patterns to a public cloud model.

Remarkably, I think VMware pulled it off. At least for now. They released a solution to help customers run workload in AWS and take advantage of their existing investment in VMware. They extended that to the scale and flexibility that AWS provides while also providing native hooks and features from AWS that extend what an enterprise can leverage from both VMware and AWS. Granted, it is not like going all in native AWS, but, for many companies that effort is incredibly daunting and likely too large an undertaking for any one team. A major workload migration of applications and services for many companies requires multiple projects and years to complete.

VMware is helping address this gap by allowing enterprises to migrate workloads into AWS but still leave them in their native VMware format. The tools and constructs (Software Defined Data Center or SDDC) that VMware customers are used to stay the same, so they can just leverage running them in AWS. This flexibility gives customers more time to determine what is the right environment, cost model and workload placement for their needs. Long term, I still believe that most customers will figure out how to properly leverage native cloud services (from all the public cloud providers) but this solution is a smart way to address an immediate need that will last several years. I think of it as the "easy button" for enterprise IT teams who need to have workloads running in AWS to help support their organization.

Day 1

The day one presentations at Cloud Field Day 7 focused on an overview of the offering, a deep dive into the networking and how that works, details into data center extension and hybrid cloud, and finally how to do migration and the tools available to you. If you are not familiar with VMware Cloud on AWS then watching these videos will go a long way to understanding what is offered. It is a unique offering, even though VMware has agreements with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud the integration and partnership is different. I won't belabor the points of how they are different, theses presentations were all about the AWS offering, just know that the work and partnership has been more extensive. I would recommend the migration and networking presentations if you already know a bit about VMware Cloud on AWS, it helps to explain how you will leverage what they have built out.

Day 2

The day two presentations jumped into specific services and attributes of the solution. It went over virtual desktop using Horizon 7 on top of VMware Cloud on AWS - I'm not entirely convinced this is any better than Workspaces that AWS provides, but it does keep things the same if you have already deployed Horizon 7 on-premises. DR as a Service (DRaaS) was up next showing off how to leverage SRM, very straight forward, they really did make this part easy for admins. No cloud service offering can go to long without bringing up Kubernetes (K8s) and this was no exception. The offerings and options are pretty overwhelming so check out the video for more information if K8s is your thing. If you want to integrate your VMware Cloud on AWS with native AWS services then you need to have a method to make that integration work. They presented on how this functions (it is slightly different than if you are used to using AWS service endpoints). Many organization who want to leverage application streamlining make use of marketplaces and pre-build packages to make standing up well known applications and platforms a bit easier. VMware has a cloud marketplace for that purpose. I'm not sure how viable their marketplace will be long-term given the ease that you can deploy from the AWS Marketplace to a VPC and leverage that native ability but it is a "nice to have" in the current transition for those that can't deal with porting their apps or platforms.

So what does this mean for enterprises running the full suite of VMware products and technology?

You have a relatively easy way to getting your existing environment running in public cloud - but it really isn't public cloud in how the IT market defines it. You are leveraging public cloud infrastructure and a few of their constructs but you are really running VMware SDDC as a Service.
You will be paying to run your existing application and platforms in AWS but you won't have as much control over size, scale and costs as if you were to do the effort to port and move to AWS.
You will have to address a shared administrative role and permissions (VMware is running the environment in AWS for you), some enterprises that is a deal breaker.
You need to evaluate the benefits this solution versus starting to adopt public cloud in an incremental way and port or migration your applications to a native cloud architecture.
You can potentially reduce or completely decommission any data centers you operate for disaster recovery or high availability reasons and leverage VMware Cloud on AWS and scale as needed.
You could use VMware Cloud on AWS to potentially spin out a division or company and then hand off that infrastructure, applications and platforms to a new team with much less headache than moving things out of your data center.
You will still have data gravity problems, they just won't look the same as they do for public cloud services.
You will need to have a savvy networking team as the requirements around VMware NSX and AWS networking services are not going to get easier.

If you decide to watch the videos and you have a question feel free to hit me up on twitter (@ehorley) and use hashtag #CFD7, that way others can jump in to help if I missed it. I'm always interested to hear a different perspective or view about a technology, let me know what you think about VMware Cloud on AWS and if it is a good solution for the market right now.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in CFD7. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event if travel was involved. In addition, sometimes small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event.

Cloud Field Day 7 - All virtual but still a Tech Field Day event in every way

2020-04-21T10:00:00.001-07:00

Adapting to the times is a given in the technology field and the current worldwide crisis around COVID-19 has forced some changes for Tech Field Day events and the Cloud Field Day 7 event starting April 22, 2020 in particular. We will be doing everything online and while I will miss getting to hang out with many of my friends and colleagues who will be participating it is nice to know we can continue to contribute and engage in this fashion.

So check out the live feeds and videos, it all starts Wednesday morning at 8 am PDT. The line up of sponsors is good. We will be hearing from these sponsors over a few days, check the site for specifics:

VMware - VMware Cloud on AWS Onboarding, DC Extensions and Cloud Migration

Stellus

VMware - VMware Cloud on AWS Horizon 7 VDI, Kubernetes, AWS Services and Marketplace

SolarWinds

Pensando

If you decide to watch and you have a question during one of the live sessions feel free to hit me up on twitter (@ehorley) and I will see if I can get it asked. You can also just use hashtag #CFD7 and others can jump in to help if I missed it.

- Ed

Network Field Day 21 - NGINX - Making Sense of Service Mesh

2020-01-13T09:00:00.000-08:00

NGINX presented on their service mesh solution at Network Field Day 21, and you should check out the presentation by Faisal Memon explaining what they have built. He explains what a service mesh is, why you might need it and how it is integrated into NGINX.

If you have spent any significant time as a practitioner in network engineering you will eventually end up helping with a project that involves a distributed publish/subscribe message system - which today we call a service mesh. In earlier times, we might have referred to it as a service or message bus and used technology like the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) which is a standard developed by the Object Management Group (OMG) to provide interoperability among distributed objects. Or maybe you installed and used a commercial software solution like Tibco Rendezvous which has been around for 20 years or you were involved in the financial industry and you implemented the FIX protocol.

My point is, the concepts and design ideas for a service mesh have been around for decades and really are nothing new at all. Effectively, they are a distributed message queue with a standard API run over a network. What has changed over time is the ubiquity of their use in many common platforms and architectures today. I believe one of the reasons so many platforms use them is because developers have become increasingly frustrated with the networking NAT/PAT/DNS problems and would prefer to have a more elegant routing and name space than what classic IPv4 and DNS provide. There is a lot to unpack around that last sentence and I likely won't get to it in this post but just accept that the way many enterprises are deploying and running their network are not optimal for application developers trying to deploy new application workloads within the data center environment.

There are many options to choose from for a service mesh. A not so brief list of some options would be:
Istio/Envoy
Console Connect
Linkerd2
Maesh
NGINX Service Mesh
Microsoft Azure Service Fabric
RabbitMQ
Hashicorp Consul
AWS App Mesh

Because of the role that a service mesh provide, it matches very cleanly with application proxy services. This is a natural fit for something like NGINX because that is where it is commonly deployed too. Often NGINX is used as an application delivery controller (ADC) or a classic server load balancer (SLB) along with a proxy for application traffic. This proxy role allow NGINX to have a comprehensive view into the application, even with a distributed application front end. Providing a sidecar proxy function to allow more enhanced services to be managed and run without burdening the application developer is one of the benefits you gain. For example, TLS certificate management, mutual TLS (for secure app to app communication), tracing and monitoring, metrics and reporting, traffic controls and any other services can be coordinated, synchronized and managed separately from the application and not burden the developer with having to know all those specific items to get their application work.

One of the benefits of having a service mesh built into NGINX is the fact that NGINX is now the most widely deployed commercially supported web server in the top 1000 websites. This means that having a service mesh solution integrated into the platform makes adoption and use of a service mesh far more likely to occur because NGINX is used in so many places and in so many deployments. The other interesting part is the fact that many service mesh solutions can be swapped in and out depending on the need requirements of the application developers. That means that other platforms can either leverage with NGINX has build with their service mesh technology or they can swap it out and use Hashicorp Consul or whatever other service mesh technology they are already utilizing. It is very flexible and it is a technology all network engineers should be comfortable helping deploy, operate and support in their environment.

So it is highly likely, at some point, you will be involved with some a project that makes use of a service mesh and you should take the time to learn and understand how it is used and commonly deployed. Because of the popularity and wide scale adoption of NGINX it makes a lot of sense to have a good understanding of what they have built and how to use it.

- Ed

Network Field Day 21 - Itential - The Steady Progression of Network Automation

2019-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

At some point you run into tool overload. Given the diverse number of tools coming out for networking thing can get complex in a hurry. With automation all the rage along with software defined networks, intent based networking, SD-WAN, underlays, overlays, controllers and new security solutions it is incredibly hard to integrate everything. Never mind the streaming telemetry and analytics, logging, cloud networking, cloud security, IP address management and tracking all these resources too.

So how do you stitch all this together into something that is usable, practical and matches the workflow that your team has adopted? How can you allow these things to work together but not invest years in your networking team to build up coding skills that are not core to their daily jobs? Finally, is there anything flexible enough and extensible to allow your team of low code or no code network engineers to be functional quickly but leverage some of the gains of automation and tool integration?

This is where Itential comes into the picture because they are a network software automation company that is trying to address this core transformation problem. They are not trying to replace any of the best of breed tools that you have (or are considering adopting) for your environment. Instead, they are trying to provide the widest capabilities to integrate them together and do it in a low code or no code manner with the right API and third-party support. What is great is that your network engineer team today can likely integrate and extend the tools they are using (or are interested in using) right away. This means they can replicate many of the common tasks and workflows they are doing manually and making them repeatable and audit-able in the Itential world. Most of those tasks are likely run-book or step by step guidelines for getting changes made to an environment or updating settings or parameters on a variety of networking gear. This is where Itential can have the greatest impact of helping you to understand what you have in your existing environment, managing a workflow and providing the building blocks to get to more complex and interesting automation.

In the overview presentation by Chris Wade, Co-founder and CTO of Itential, he outlines the typical phases of network automation. Starting at Legacy, which starts at manual (CLI) and some scripting. Next moves to the Current view, what they term assisted manual. The Next view covers machine first and finally Future covers programmable. The following Diagram show the specifics. It helps frame the journey and the likely steps you will take in automating your environment.

The descriptions and diagram don’t do justice to how Chris explains it, so it is worth the time to go watch what he has to say. It is a quick 20-minute investment of time but super helpful because he explains many of the typical challenges and the process many organizations go through in moving to network automation and how their product is built to match up to that.

I’m very interested in what Itential is doing because it can have a broad and meaningful impact on many organizations to help move them forward in adopting network automation. But the move isn’t a huge burden or hurdle, it is incremental, builds on existing investments and provides a clear road-map of what you would tackle next. This is often missing in many other solutions, so it is nice to see a company who gets the longer term journey and shares that in an upfront way with their customers.

- Ed

ps: You can also check out fellow #NFD21 delegate Amy Arnold's blog post on Itential where she does a great job covering the API aspect of what Itential is up to with their automation gateway solution.

Network Field Day 21 - Network to Code - Changing the networking landscape

2019-11-05T09:00:00.000-08:00

It is not often you get to see a friend and colleague start and grow a business from scratch and have major impact on your industry. My friend Jason Edelman has done just that with his company, Network to Code. It was cool to have him, and his team, present at NFD21 and I wanted to highlight a couple of the things I found impressive about what they are investing in.

First, they are supporting NetBox as an open source project and developing on top of that. They are extending what NetBox can do by hiring Jeremy Stretch (who started the project while he was at Digital Ocean) to work full time on building out functionality and features in NetBox. This allows Network to Code to provide best in class capabilities for companies that wish to use, extend and scale up their projects leveraging NetBox. If you haven’t heard of NetBox, you can check it out the GitHub repository at https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox and the documentation at https://netbox.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ for a more in depth understanding. In summary, from the documentation site: “NetBox is an open source web application designed to help manage and document computer networks.” And it includes the following:

IP address management (IPAM) - IP networks and addresses, VRFs, and VLANs
Equipment racks - Organized by group and site
Devices - Types of devices and where they are installed
Connections - Network, console, and power connections among devices
Virtualization - Virtual machines and clusters
Data circuits - Long-haul communications circuits and provider
Secrets - Encrypted storage of sensitive credentials

As accurate as the description is, it really doesn’t do this project justice. It is cool what Jeremy and the community has built out, I think many organizations will find it incredibly useful in helping to keep their infrastructure world in order without having to glue together a crazy number of NMS, spreadsheets and diagrams together in a wiki and hope to keep that current. Because it is API and automation focused it makes it easier for operators to leverage custom scripts, normalized data models, and integration into a lot of other tools. The exciting part is that Network to Code is planning on providing commercial support for the product so customers who are nervous about not having formal support for an open source product they would run can obtain it from Network to Code. This is fantastic news for adoption and interest in NetBox. You should check out the NFD21 presentation Jeremy and John gave about NetBox.

Second, for me is the community and the effort that Network to Code has put into helping to put support and resources behind that. If you are not aware, they host a Network to Code slack channel (https://slack.networktocode.com/ ) that has 10,000+ members and is a great resource to start learning about what is happening in the networking automation space. They continue to invest in open source tooling and contributions and believe in the model of sharing and supporting interesting projects. The team at Network to Code has build some of the largest commercial network vendor integrations for a variety of platforms but most notable is for Ansible. If you are not familiar with Network to Code then check out Jason giving an overview of the company, and explaining who is Network to Code.

I’m excited to hear what Network to Code will do next and they are a company you should keep an eye on if you are in the networking space. Great people with a goal to change how the industry is doing networking.

- Ed

Network Field Day 21 - Forward Networks - Useful Intent Based Networking

2019-10-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges in larger organizations and service providers is the inherent complexity in the design, deployment and operation of their networks. The reasons are varied and often a function of their business needs, their legacy technology and business drivers and many decades of merger and divestitures. Basically, things out of the control of the technology implementors and operators. The operational impact of deploying or removing a service from the network can be profound. It is often not documented completely, has changed over time and is intertwined with other services in some way that may not be obvious with just a simple assessment.

These challenges are the source of real operational risks that can translate to financial losses for a company. It is no wonder that many larger organizations are slow to implement changes, have challenges understanding impacts of changes they need or want to do and have increasingly complex security and policy issues. Compliance and validation are now becoming standard audit requests from third parties and financial penalties are not insignificant to those that fail to pass many of these new standards.

So, what is an organization like this to do regarding getting their arms around the impacts of changes within their environment? How will they manage a multi-vendor, heterogeneous networking environment? ForwardNetworks is addressing this need by allowing companies to build a digital twin of their network, which is not easy! This approach allows organizations to validate configuration changes, their impacts and understand what actions could potentially be damaging and negatively impact their compliance, SLAs or business services. This digital twin allows for several unique aspects of what Forward Networks can provide to customers. They are an intent driven solution that provides network automation and verification with a useful and practical user interface that enables network operators to really understand the impact of planned changes.

I recommend watching the Network Field Day presentation from Brandon Heller, CTO and co-founder which explains what Forward Networks does and goes over the UI of the product. I do believe that the product, as it is built today, is likely more appropriate for larger organizations. However, I can easily see them expanding their customer base and providing the product as a SaaS platform for small to medium sized companies with less complex networks to leverage the automation and validation capabilities. Given the natural fit to integrate to cloud networking via API’s and their support of existing network and security product technologies that are used on-premises this would be a very desirable solution for many in the complex role of operating highly available or complex networks.

I was impressed with what Forward Networks has built and for operators I believe there are many that would spend most of their time within their UI versus spending their time in the CLI of most networking and security platforms. The good news is that they do not preclude you from using the CLI still and can work in conjunction with many solutions that are based on that as the primary interface to deploy and operate their products. It is a win/win in terms of helping teams adopt a new method and tool.

If you are struggling with large scale networking changes within your organization or you want better validation and verification, along with automation to push out changes then seriously evaluate Forward Networks. I have my fingers crossed that their product will go down market and be something even more of us get to use.

- Ed

Network Field Day 21 - Aruba SD-Branch - Evolution

2019-10-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

I am going to focus on the Aruba SD-Branch solution (their combination of SD-WAN -LAN and Cloud making it SD-Branch) presentation that is only a portion of the overall presentation that Aruba gave at Network Field Day 21. I digress quickly, the industry is stuck on Software Defined or SD as a naming convention and I think someone in marketing needs to be creative and break away from it and come up with a solution/product name. Honestly, SD-<anything> has lost all meaning. I think Aruba should rename the product to fit into their existing product naming and not cave to industry convention. With that done, let’s get back to the technical nuts of bolts of what Aruba presented.

We started with an overview presentation (https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-why-sd-branch/) around Why SD-Branch and how it is different than tradition SD-WAN. In simple terms, they are using the same technology to do application insight and management for LAN, WAN and Cloud services through a single interface which is build on their wireless and wired LAN portfolio. It really does make a lot of sense for companies to want to move this direction. To be able to manage LAN, WAN, Cloud, Wireless, Wired, Identity and Security from a common interface with metrics and performance. In addition, props to the Aruba team for having a great user interface. It makes sense, is easy to find things, is clean and snappy too.

So, what was most compelling about SD-Branch and specifically the SD-WAN portion? First, you get a unified interface to manage everything and one that is done correctly, not just cobbling together a bunch of separate products and hoping everyone uses the same terms and layout. Second, I think it was the flexibility in configuration. The fact that you can easily stand up and have multiple design topologies for VPN and do that across multiple Internet and private dedicated links in many combinations shows that Aruba really understands what customers are trying to address. The demos really highlight how easy and straight forward it is to configure, monitor and operate the network so you should check that out at https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-seamless-sd-wan-orchestration/ and finally, you really should see how everything is displayed in a single view for operations. If you are willing to invest and go all in with Aruba you get a lot of upside from an operations view. Check out https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-simplify-network-operations/

Given that most SD-WAN solutions will likely provide a break even ROI in 12-18 months it is likely worth investing in Aruba SD-Branch if you are an existing Aruba wireless/wired customer. If you are doing an evaluation of products today such as LAN (wired and wireless), WAN, Cloud, and SD-WAN you would be doing a disservice in not putting Aruba on your list. I’ve been very impressed with what they have been doing over the last several years and my experience at #NFD21 has shown they are continuing down the right road and build on top of their great product portfolio.

One note, they don’t have IPv6 support in their SD-WAN product yet, but given the great IPv6 support they have in their LAN (wired and wireless) products today I would not be surprised to see that happen for SD-WAN soon. Fingers crossed they keep up the great work and get IPv6 in there and push their competitors to do the same.
- Ed

ps: You can also check out fellow #NFD21 delegate Remington Loose's blog post on Aruba where he does a great job covering the technical aspects and components of what Aruba is up to with their SD-Branch solution.